Life and Death with Pushing Daisies

Share.

The cast and creators talk about this unique new ABC series.

By Travis Fickett

ABC's Pushing Daisies is a show that has quite a lot of critics talking. It's a show with a heavy style and a real sense of whimsy. And believe me I really tried to think of a better word to describe it, as one should never use "whimsy" unless they really mean it. But in this case it just fits. The series was created by Bryan Fuller, the creator of Dead Like Me who has come off a recent run on the smash hit Heroes. Director Barry Sonnenfeld (Adams Family, Men in Black) directed the pilot and is a producer on the series along with producing team Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen. The cast includes Lee Pace (Wonderfalls), Anna Friel (Timeline), Chi McBride (The Nine, Boston Public), Swoosie Kurtz (Huff, Sisters), Kristin Chen0with (The West Wing), and Ellen Greene (most recently seen playing Sylar's mother on Heroes). IGN TV attended the recent press conference for Pushing Daisies at the Television Critics Association event in Beverly Hills.

Bryan Fuller started off by talking about where the idea for the show came from. "The story actually started out as a spinoff of Dead Like Me, and I put it in my back pocket. And I went into Warner Bros. and was talking about ideas to do for a new show, and I pitched them the idea of a guy who can touch dead people once and bring them back to life, and if he touches them again, they go back to being dead. Problem is he touches a dead girl, falls in love with her, and can never touch her again. So that was sort of the core of the idea. So it was built around this impossible romance which kind of infects all of the stories around it, so everything has a little bit of sweetness to it."

Sonnenfeld talked about what he had learned with his past experiences in television that he was bringing to this show. "I had produced and directed other television pilots like The Tick, like Maximum Bob, and I didn't stick around," he said. "I moved on. And I decided, when I got back into television, that I needed to stay involved with the show. So, for instance, on Pushing Daisies, I'm directing three of the first 13 episodes. If we get picked up for the back nine, I'll probably come back and do some more. And I'm much more involved in the continuing of the show than I used to, but I love television. I think ABC is the right place for this show."

Fuller also talked about how the "procedural" aspect of the series came into play, and whether that helped the show get over certain hurdles on the way to being produced. "Well, there definitely was&#Array;not necessarily an edict, but a strong suggestion that if the show were procedural, then it would definitely be much more digestible to the network and to audiences and they would have a framework to allow all the more special and different things to go down easier. So we've embraced the procedural aspect of it in a way that all of our stories, all of our procedural stories come out of a place reflective of where the characters are, so it's really a metaphor of what's going on for everybody. For instance, we're doing an episode. The procedural story is about a whistleblower, but really it's about all the secrets the characters are keeping from themselves. So we use the whistleblower story to highlight where our characters are in that episode, and we have fun with the metaphor of it all. Because the show is a fairy tale and that we can use that style of the fairy tale show to tell thematic and metaphorical stories."

The show has a distinctive narration by Jim Dale, who is the narrator for the Harry Potter audio books. Fuller talked about how Dale got involved, and what his involvement in the show will be. "Well, in the original script, it was described as imagine Patrick Stewart reading you a bedtime story for the narration, and Dan Jinks actually said, 'I'm a big fan of the Harry Potter books, so we should get Jim Dale,' and he was game. He's going to be doing our narration. And it would be great to find a way to get him to actually appear on screen."